Did you hear? Celebrity Apprentice was knocked off the air!
Heh...
Everybody and his brother is writing about the death of Osama bin Laden this morning, so this diary will probably not get much attention. But I have a couple of things to say anyway.
1. Last week, right-wingers were saying the release of the birth certificate was done to distract everyone from Ben Bernanke's speech. Now we know, it probably was timed to distract from something -- which it did effectively. There was undoubtedly a peak in White House activity leading up to he raid. I suspect that the birth certificate provided some cover for that. Score one for the Obama White House. They actually managed to keep something secret that absolutely had to be kept secret.
2. It was a weekend of pwn-ing Donald Trump. I commented to a friend last night (before the news broke) that between the birth certificate release and the Correspondent's Dinner, Obama had effectively buried Trump. The release made him look like a liar and an ass. (Which is what he is, so it was quite deserved.) Then making him sit there and take it as the president and comedian Seth Meyers shellacked him, made him look like someone who can dish it out but can't take it. He left that dinner with his tail between his legs. But Obama had one more slap to The Donald's face left to land. The White House notified the networks that the announcement was coming around 10:30. They had to know they wouldn't be ready to actually go on air until after 11:30. But the timing allowed them to knock "Celebrity Apprentice" off the air. (And it couldn't happen to a more deserving program.) Once again we are reminded that Obama is the leader of the free world, and Donald Trump is the host of a fake reality show.
3. One of the helicopters went down. Meteor Blades tweeted last night about remembering how helicopters going down killed Jimmy Carter's hostage rescue mission. I remember that, too. I was freshly out of the military at that time. (I was a WAVE from 1971-1976.) I don't pretend to be an expert on military tactics. All I know is that while stationed at NAS Pensacola, which had extensive helicopter repair facilties, I came to wonder about the efficacy of helicopters as military transportation.
The Carter mission failed because we had very little experience with desert warfare at the time. Sand got sucked into the helicopter engines and they went down. But more than thirty years later, we're still having trouble with the helicopters.
4. I don't want to celebrate the violent death of a human being -- no matter how deserving. After all, who am I, or anyone else for that matter, to say who deserves to die and who doesn't? But, I can celebrate the end of the 9/11 era. That's what this is. We are no longer stuck at the moment when the towers fell. We can go forward now knowing that 9/11 is the past. It is a moment of closure.
Time to move forward on the economy, on jobs, on climate change.
This is the true ending of the Bush era. We can finally leave him behind and get on with the future.